Star Wars Outlaws Lets You Turn Off Yellow Paint, But That Might Not Be Enough

Summary

Yellow paint has long been used in video games to mark interactable objects and routes, and it’s also one of the more controversial mechanics in gaming. While it might sound kind of silly, I get it. One side believes that having yellow paint splashed all over a game’s environments to make sure players pay attention to specific things reduces the immersion. A lot of open world games do this – it’s pretty garish inlast year’s Resident Evil 4 Remakeand the Final Fantasy 7 remakes.

At the same time, it’s true that alotof players can get lost and frustrated when interactable objects aren’t made obvious. As my colleague James Troughtonarguedlast year, it’s fair to break immersion if it means not missing important commodities like ammo or crafting materials, especially in a game like Resi where collectible resources are key to your survival. Sometimes, without neon signs pointing in the right direction, players have no idea how to move forward towards their objective. Making games playable for as many people as possible can sometimes mean that developers have to make things as obvious as possible.

Star Wars Outlaws Lets You Erase Yellow Paint

Interestingly,Star Wars Outlawshas seen both sides of the debate anddecided to eliminate the problem altogether. For players who can’t do without obvious signposting, Outlaws’ climbing sequences and puzzles are smeared with the yellow stuff, but it’s also going to give players the option to toggle off all that paint, at least on “core navigational elements”, with an Explorer Mode.

Ubisoft has included Explorer Mode in its games before, mainly in Assassin’s Creed, in an attempt to make exploration feel more organic. In Assassin’s Creed, the regular guided mode shows you your current quests and all required tasks on screen, while exploration will only provide you hints and directions in the quest log, forcing you to go out and search for your objective instead of heading straight to a marker.

Is Explorer Mode Really All That Much Better?

It’s unclear if Explorer Mode in Outlaws will function in the same way, but its implementation in Assassin’s Creed left much to be desired. While it ostensibly mixes things up a little by forcing you to wander around a little more than you would in Guided mode, in practice, it feels less organic and more like a gimmick that adds extra steps to a quest.

I’d like to think that Outlaws will feel a little less prescriptive – from thepreview coverageI’ve read so far, there’s a lot of cool stuff to discover and moments of emergent gameplay that make it feel less like a typical Ubisoft game. The expert quests in particular give me hope that this won’t be another checklist-directed jaunt through the galaxy, but it’s still hard to say how directed players will be in general and how much paint we’ll find in the wild.

It’s a little disappointing that yellow paint is still so apparent in Outlaws by default – a lot of games are starting to work around this by establishing visual language cues with colours, textures, or lighting, or allowing you to highlight interactable objects in an area with a button a laBaldur’s Gate 3. I understand the need for signposting, of course, I’m just perplexed that after so much discourse about the paint, this is the specific form of signposting Massive Entertainment chose. We’ll have to wait and see how necessary this paint is when the game is released, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be playing on Explorer Mode from the start.